Posing with al sharpton has to help
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IMO, he makes the same mistakes that almost any policritter is prone to. Forgetting that they're in "the bubble". They forget that the attitudes of their peers in office, staffers, the media, lobbyists, and all the other sorts of tile crawlers DO NOT come even close to representing the nominal average views of their constituency or "middle America" as they're so fond of repeating endlessly.
They still have their core beliefs, but when they decide they're going to come out and be a "third way" kind of pragmatic guy, it takes a Leftward, or simply somewhat loony slant, like looking a bent image of a walking stick stuck into some clear water. The ends of the spectrum that get represented take on a kind of inverse bell-curve, with the FSA at the bottom, and the big money corporatist asset class at the top being heard the loudest. Only a very few groups like the NRA can cut through the signal to noise ratio.
My guess is that if Rand had some dedicated staffers who repeatedly popped the bubble, his positions and utterances would be markedly less moonbat.
The Left suffers from a bit less of a bubble, since their constituencies are more prone to align ideologically with them, but that's because so much of the Left's base itself resides in the larger more nebulous MSM/pop-culture bubble, or simply suffers from low-information emotive reasoning. Probably half or more of the Left's base could be talked out of their support if you can pin them down one-on-one with basic experiments and logical follow-through. Like the proverbial Libertarian/Right college professor who engages in 'wealth redistribution' by taxing and distributing out the A's in a class to average over everyone's grades so all the D and F students "pass" and then everyone can watch as the A students give up etc.
A very rare few, maybe the Ted Cruz types understand that the more they piss off the people who comprise "the bubble", and the more they make them cough and tug nervously at their collars with their utterances and policies, the better they're doing.